annoyance they call them names that are not to be repeated. The mill girls wear bright-coloured gowns, white aprons, and nothing on their heads. If a policeman catches them at any mischief they either clatter off in their clogs with shrieks of laughter, or knock him down and kick him most unmercifully. They are as strong as men, and as beautiful, some of them, as saints; but they are very unsaintlike creatures really--irresponsible, and with little or no idea of right and wrong. One scarcely believes that they have souls--and I am always surprised to find that anything not cruel and coarse can survive in the hearts of people, begrimed, body and mind, like these, by their hard surroundings; but it is there, nevertheless--the human nature, and the poetry, and the something ready to thrill to better things. A gentleman has a lovely place not far from us, where the trees have been spared by a miracle. Nightingales seldom wander so far north, but a few years ago a stray one was heard there, and the wonder and the beauty of its voice brought hundreds from the mills and crowded streets to hear it sing. Special trains were run from the neighbouring city to accommodate the crowds that came nightly to wait in the moonlight and listen; and an enterprising trader set up a stall, and sold gingerbeer. The story ends there, but I like it, don't you? especially the gingerbeer part of it. It was told me by one who remembers the circumstance. "My greatest pleasure in life is in my flowers, they are dearer to me than any I ever had before, because they are all so delicate, and require such infinite care and tenderness to keep them alive in this uncongenial climate. I have my thrushes also--two, which I stole from a nest in a wood one moonlight night, and brought up by hand on bread and milk and scraped beef. I had to get up at daylight, and feed them every hour until dark; but the clergy will not allow that this obligation was a proper excuse for staying away from church, and just now I am unhappy in the feeling that their religion must be inhuman. But my thrushes have well repaid the trouble. They call me when I go into the room, and come to me when I open the door of their cage, and perch on my shoulder. One of them, Israfil, sings divinely. People who come to hear him see only a little brown bird with speckled breast, and call him a thrush; but _I_ know he is Israfil, 'the angel of song, and most melodious of God's creatures;' and _he_ thinks that I have wings. He told me so! "I wish you would send me a basket of snails packed up in lettuce leaves. I don't know why, but I can find none here, and I cannot hear of one ever having been seen in the county. But please do not send them unless you are quite sure you can spare them." "Ideala is trying to hide herself behind these pretty trivialities," Claudia said. "I always suspect that there is something more wrong than usual when she adopts this playful tone and childlike simplicity of taste."